[Python-ideas] Syntax for dedented strings (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at gmail.com
Tue Aug 16 23:33:26 CEST 2011

Hello all,

I'm sure this will be shot down [1], but it annoys me often enough that I'm going to suggest it anyway. :-)

A recent tweet of Raymond's reminded me how useful textwrap.dedent() is for dedenting triple quoted strings in code blocks:

def function(): this_string = textwrap.dedent("""
Here is some indented text. that dedent will handle for us.""" )

Unfortunately that doesn't work for docstrings as they must be string literals. It is compounded by the fact that you can't even create the docstring for a class and manually assign it later. (Why not? But that's another issue...)

How about another string prefix for dedented strings:

class Thing(object): d""" This text will be, nicely dedented, thank you very much. """"

All the best,

Michael Foord

[1] Because of the -100 rule as much as anything else, which applies doubly to features requiring new syntax https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericgu/archive/2004/01/12/57985.aspx

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